More silence, and I could almost picture Jake sitting behind his desk with his eyes closed, controlling his temper on the outside while it raged unchecked just beneath the surface.

“How badly was Holt hurt?”

I shrugged, though he couldn’t see me. “He wasn’t, this morning. From tonight, just a graze. He’s fine. I am, too,” I added, though he hadn’t asked.

“I have a body to get rid of and witnesses to deal with. Get Holt patched up, get yourself patched up, and consider yourselves grounded for the night. Neither of you are to leave his suite before the sun rises. And I want you in my office alone at eight in the morning, or you’ll be back in the basement five minutes after that.”

Fuck!

“And, Kori, if I have to come looking for you, there won’t be enough of you left to bury.”

Shitshitshit! I hung up my phone and immediately set a timer for seven-thirty the next morning, because I knew from experience that Jake would be setting his for seven fifty-nine, and I couldn’t afford to be late.

“Go on.” Kenley took the bloody rag and handed me a thick gauze bandage to replace it. She looked sick, and I wondered how much of that she’d heard. “I’ll take care of this.” She dropped the rag into the tub with everything else I’d bled on and lit a match, then dropped it onto the pile. Flames flared behind me as I hurried into my room.

Holding the gauze in place with one hand, I plucked a hand wipe from a package on my dresser and carefully wiped all the blood from my neck and chest, then dropped the used wipe in the trash. The blood on it wouldn’t be viable, thanks to the sanitizer. Then I left the gauze in place—it was stuck with drying blood anyway—while I put on a fresh bra and carefully shrugged into a clean shirt.

“Here. Wear this.” Kenley stepped into my room with a gauzy blue scarf. She taped the bandage to my skin, then arranged the scarf around my neck to mostly cover it. Tower would still notice, and Ian knew what had happened, but with any luck, no one else would notice anything wrong.

“Thanks.” I hardly recognized my own reflection with the scarf on. I looked like Kenley, only skinnier. “Where’s Van?”

Kenley flushed. “She doesn’t live here, you know.”

But suddenly I kind of wished she did. I didn’t want to leave my sister alone when Jake was pissed at me.

“Call her. See if she’ll come hang out with you.”

The blood drained from her face with one glance at mine, and she nodded without question. If I sounded worried, she knew she should be, too, and she rarely wasted time arguing. For which I was grateful.

“I have to stay with Ian, then report to Jake in the morning. But I’ll check back in afterward, just in case.”

“Okay. Be careful, Kori.”

I hugged her, then she flipped the light switch for me and I tried to step back into Ian’s apartment, only to find the opening blocked by blazing light in the visible spectrum, which could only mean one thing. He was in the bathroom.

Frustrated but not really surprised, I closed my eyes and reached out mentally until I found a patch of darkness in his suite big enough to step into. I walked forward and a moment later I slammed right into the inside of the closet door.

I opened the door and stepped into the bedroom, and was greeted with the sound of water running in the bathroom. “Hello?” I called, but there was no answer. “I had to come into the closet since you’re—”

Half-naked and dripping wet…

Ian stood in bathroom doorway, hair dripping, wearing nothing but a towel he was just then tying loosely at his waist. His chest and stomach were bare, dark and defined against the thick white cotton, and beaded with clean water.

Carton of hard lemonade, my ass. That was a full-on six-pack.

I couldn’t stop staring. He was beautiful.

Twenty-Three

Ian

I stepped out of the shower, still tucking the towel in at my waist, and looked up to find Kori standing in the bedroom in fresh clothes, a blue silk scarf only half hiding the bandage on her neck. Her conflicted gaze met mine, then traveled lower, and I let her look.

She took a few hesitant steps forward and her hand twitched, like she wanted to touch me, but also wanted to run from me. But she kept coming, slowly, and I stood still, afraid to spook her, because she kind of looked like a deer caught in oncoming headlights. Like she was mesmerized for the moment, but any small distraction could send her fleeing into the night.

“We’re grounded,” she said, her voice a whisper.

“Like a broken airplane?”

She shook her head. “Like a naughty child.”

“What does that mean?” I asked when she stopped on the threshold, one hand clutching the bathroom door frame, like her grip was the only thing keeping her from fleeing. Or maybe from coming in.

“He knows about the park, and he knows about the alley,” she said, still standing in the doorway, and I wondered if she was stuck there. Not in, but not out. Hovering in that liminal moment between realizing there’s a choice to be made and actually making it. “So we’re supposed to stay here all night.”

I fought the urge to pull her closer. “Tower’s punishment for not telling him about the park is to lock us up here together? All night? I’m not sure he understands how punishment is supposed to work.”

“It’s not punishment. It’s a safety precaution.”

Right. Normally I’d feel the need to remind Tower that I don’t take orders from him yet. But I wasn’t going to object to a night spent with Kori, even if we did nothing but play cards and watch TV all night long.